An Introduction to TMAPI

There are several software packages for Java developers when they need to develop applications using XML Topic Maps. There are some proprietary software vendors and also open source packages like TM4j, tinyTIM, and a few others.

In the Java tradition to standardize interfaces, the TMAPI project has proposed a set of Java interfaces which particular Topic Map implementations may choose to adhere to. The obvious advantage for the application developer is to use only that single set of interfaces and to choose a particular implementation on other merits.

Those of you who every now and then read underlying standards may notice that there is a strong coherence between TMAPI and the class model behind TMDM, the TM data model. This, of course, is no coincidence: both have been developed in lock-step. The result is that Java developers are programming close to the (high-level) TM model.

Topic Maps is the only formal semantic model which is optimized for humans, not for computers. Applications and web portals based on Topic Maps are easy to use, without limitations for flexibility and creativity.